3.1 The Holiness Revivals of the Fin de Siècle

My exploration of the history of the ideology of The Wesleyan Church continues. In this next set of installments, we explore the twentieth century up to the 1968 merger. The picture to the left is Seth Cook Rees, one of the founders of the Pilgrim Holiness Church. 

Previous posts have been:

Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking 

2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s
2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection
2.3 The Birth of the American Holiness Movement

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1. The turn of the century (1900) was a time of conflicting eschatologies. The Wesleyan Methodists were postmillennial in their founding. They were activists who believed in changing society to look more and more like the kingdom of God. Slavery was wrong so needed to be ended. Similarly, women should be empowered to preach and vote like men. At the end of the 1800s, there was a spirit of inevitable progress in the world.

Accompanying this progress was the acceleration of foreign missions. The Methodist movement had always been evangelistic. The young Wesley himself had come to Georgia as a missionary. Now, as "manifest destiny" held that the United States should take over the entire continent, Methodism followed closely to the west with missions. And as the US increasingly forced open trade overseas in places like Japan and Korea, missions soon followed. Foreign missions fit the spirit of manifest destiny.

Interestingly, women played a crucial role in much of this mission work. Some of the most important mission organizations of the late 1800s were run by women. This was true for the Methodists, for the Free Methodists, and for a century, Wesleyan missions were heavily powered by the "Women's Missionary Society." One wonders if men were less worried about what went on overseas, so this was an area where women could have more freedom to lead. So lead they often did.

At first, the eschatology in play was postmillenial. Christianity should spread throughout the whole world as part of the world getting ready for the arrival of the kingdom of God. The flavor was one of taking over the world, in religion as in politics -- colonialization, in other words.

There's little question but that the participants in these missions genuinely wanted to see the world come to Christ and be saved. At the same time, we exported American Christian culture as well. Brainerd "Indian" School in South Dakota had Native American women in buns and skirts without make-up or jewelry -- looking just like the holiness women missionaries. If there were African or Native American dances that were part of those cultures, they were prohibited because dancing was not allowed in American holiness circles.

That is to say, there was a lack of understanding of culture -- both the missionary's own and that of the target countries -- among these early missionaries. Indeed, these missionaries generally received no training at all. The "faith principle" expected them also to go overseas immediately without having raised any support. Many died from diseases their bodies had never encountered. 

2. But there was a new eschatology on the block too in the late 1800s, one that would increasingly capture much of the American church. From its very beginning, the Pilgrim movement would be premillennial and dispensational. The cultural influence at play was the arrival of John Nelson Darby on the scene in the late 1800s.

Darby had stitched together a new and ingenious system of end-times preaching, weaving together passages from Daniel, Revelation, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Mark 13, Ezekiel 37, and beyond. This was a new eschatological brew that had never existed in the history of Christianity. But it was ingenious and had the enticing flavor of secret knowledge. 

Things would get worse and worse until there would be a rapture of all Christians. Then a seven-year Tribulation would ensue with an Antichrist. During this time, God would finish up his business with Israel, playing out the seventieth "week" of Daniel 9. The temple would be rebuilt. Sacrifices would resume. There would be a final battle between Magog and Israel. The scheme was modified in 1948 when Israel was reconstituted as a nation ahead of schedule.

This eschatology had a completely different flavor than the postmillennialism that had preceded it. Most significantly, it entailed a pessimism about the direction of the world. The return of Christ had always been part of Christian expectation, but pre-millennialism expected Christ to return very, very soon. It hyped up a vigilant eye on current events, expecting the worst, and seeing every earthquake or rumor of war as a sign that it was about to happen.

This paradigm permeated my childhood in the Pilgrim Holiness Church and my strand of the Wesleyan Church. Even today, you will regularly see posts about us being in the end times. Of course, we could be, but people somehow don't notice that we've been seeing the end times in the bushes for 150 years. People have set dates over and over again with a 100% failure rate. There was a famous book, Eighty-Eight Reasons Why the Lord Is Coming Back in 1988.

My family wondered if FDR could be the Antichrist. They wondered if JFK could be the Antichrist. People wondered if Obama could be the Antichrist, and this recent election cycle has seen any number of people saying that the signs make it clear that we are in the end times. But we've been saying these things over and over for well over a century. Somehow, we haven't noticed the pattern of our culture. (I've evaluated these biblical interpretations in this book.)

We may be in the end times. But I also won't be surprised if I live past 100. Jesus will return. But let's work till Jesus comes. 

One revivalist of the late 1800s who particularly spread this "dispensationalist" view was D. L. Moody, who evangelized in parallel with the holiness movement, at one point even testifying to entire sanctification. His theology might be summarized as a "lifeboat" theology. The world is like a sinking ship. There's nothing you can do to save the ship. We just need to get as many people into the lifeboats as possible.

These sorts of cultural forces have an effect on our thinking of which we probably aren't aware. And, if we grow up with them, they make us unthinkingly behave in a certain way. We may not realize that there is even another way to think. We may automatically assume that those who think differently are heretical or perverse. Meanwhile, we are being tossed along without knowing it.

For example, this line of thinking tends to shut down any focus on changing the world for the better. As we'll see in the next installment, our engagement with the world becomes almost entirely limited to evangelism of the soul. Possible social dimensions of the good news are eliminated and even demonized. That is seen as a "social gospel" rather than a true gospel.

Missions also changes from conquering the world for Christ to trying to get as many people saved as possible before the Lord returns. Meanwhile, the corruption and pollution of governments and the world becomes expected. "Christ against culture" in Niebuhr's scheme becomes the name of the game. Our expectation that the world will get worse and worse can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

3. The Pilgrim Holiness Church was thoroughly founded in these waters. This was one of those minor tensions in the merger with the Wesleyan Methodists, although perhaps most Wesleyan Methodists had also become pre-millennial by that time. However, the merger had the wisdom not to specify a particular view on the end times in its founding Discipline. It simply affirmed that Christ is coming again.

The Pilgrim Holiness Church was officially founded in 1922, the coming together of several smaller groups that sometimes had come out of another church and sometimes were still in that other church but were meeting as a movement on the side. Older histories often point to 1897 and the founding of the International Holiness Union and Prayer League as the beginning. Perhaps more accurately, that was the beginning of the most prominent group that would become the Pilgrim church. 

The beginning took place in the front room of the house of a man named Martin Wells Knapp. That house is now on the campus of God's Bible School in Cincinnati. Also in the room was Seth C. Rees, an "Earth Quaker" of a man who often brought controversy along with his many conversions and experiences of entire sanctification.

Rees had originally been a Quaker, although he did not have the temperament of a Quaker. It is sometimes forgotten that there was a fairly significant Quaker component to the early Pilgrim church. My own grandfather would be one example. When the Pilgrims officially organized, both of my grandfathers were there. Both had been involved with another small group in Indiana that joined the new denomination, the Holiness Christian Church.

Given this Quaker element, the Pilgrims did not emphasize baptism. Again, we have some of the minor tensions at merger. The Wesleyan Methodists brought forward infant baptism from their Methodist roots. The Pilgrims brought forward a nonchalant attitude toward baptism because of Quaker elements. Meanwhile, Baptistic influences on modern Wesleyans make it difficult to imagine that anyone would baptize a child or not baptize at all. All of them were/are simply riding the waves of Christian subcultures without realizing it. 

3. Knapp would die in 1901, perhaps under suspicious circumstances. Rees would leave the Holiness Union in a huff and get into a mess in Pasadena, California with the Nazarenes. Keith Drury wrote a brilliant piece giving the Nazarene and the Rees side to the story. As I read the Nazarene side, Rees comes across as some of my Pilgrim relatives who were sometimes difficult -- always seeing "sin in the camp," always finding heresy in so and so's teaching or preaching. Difficult people who sometimes sowed dissension.

There was a highly charismatic flavor to Pilgrim worship. There was shouting, running the aisles -- some even did some "holy jumping." It was highly emotional preaching.

The Pentecostal movement actually came out of this soil. In fact, the holiness movement would struggle a little because the new tongues-speakers used a lot of the same language -- baptism in the Holy Spirit, for example. They would try to sharply distinguish themselves from the new Pentecostals, leading to some of the strong anti-tongues sentiment in the Wesleyan Church. It has only been in recent days that the Wesleyan Church has toned down what used to be a virulent anti-tongues posture. 

Once again we see that our positions often have everything to do with historical circumstances. We forget the historical and cultural origins of these sentiments -- if we ever realized them. Then we pass strong sentiments on to the next generation, who thinks they are just reading the Bible and doing what it says. 

The Pilgrim Holiness Church finally came together as much for practical reasons as any. The original groups had much more the flavor of a movement than a church. The first Manual was three pages long, the first of which was a title page. But in 1922, we organized not least so that Pilgrim ministers could qualify for a ministerial train discount.

Helping the poor and those in squalor remained a strong emphasis of Pilgrims and Wesleyans in this period. In Cincinnati, the Holiness Union addressed those in the slums, those in prison, and those in the hospital. There was no division between helping people spiritually and helping people economically or socially (see Rees' book, Miracles in the Slums).

Camp meetings were core events for the Pilgrims and the Wesleyan Methodists. At least once a year, families would meet at the appropriate camp meeting in their area for a week, hearing preachers morning, afternoon, and evening.  

4. The flavor of the Wesleyan Methodists and Pilgrims in this period was quite different. The WMs were more structured and less emotional. The Pilgrims were revivalists and quite entrepreneurial. Both founded several colleges, but the Wesleyan Methodist ones were of a higher academic caliber and had a better survival rate. Several of the WM colleges became liberal arts institutions (e.g., Houghton, SWU, IWU), while the Pilgrim ones tended to be Bible colleges (Frankfort, Miltonvale). You can see which institutions survived better.

The origins of the Pilgrim Holiness Church fall in the same era as the founding of the Nazarene Church, and you can see above that Seth Rees danced with both. Phineas Bresee founded the first Nazarene church in LA, California in 1895. All the same marks were there as the founding of the WMs and Free Methodists -- clash with a ME bishop, insistence on preaching holiness "old school" rather than the "new school" respectability.

In Bresee's case, he had been appointed to a mission in LA and the bishop refused to reappoint him. Here again we see that helping the poor was an essential part of the holiness movement at this time. Bresee was also a vigorous supporter of women in full ministry, while the ME church would only let them be deacons at that time.

This quote from Rees captures the absolute support of women in ministry among the early Pilgrims: "Nothing but jealousy, prejudice and bigotry and a stingy love for bossing in men have prevented women’s public recognition by the church. No church that is acquainted with the Holy Ghost will object to the public ministry of women." The founders of the Free Methodist and Nazarene churches agreed.

Next: the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy

2.3 The Birth of the American Holiness Movement

We continue our exploration of the history of Wesleyan ideology with a look at the holiness movement and Wesleyan Methodist Church in the late 1800s. The picture to the left is Phoebe Palmer, the one primarily responsible for how entire sanctification was preached for well over a century.

The previous posts have been:

Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking 

2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s
2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection

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1. After the Civil War, Luther Lee viewed the purpose of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection (WMC) as accomplished. In 1867 he returned to the Methodist Episcopal Church North (MECN) along with Lucius Matlack. All of the founders were now gone. Orange Scott had died of tuberculosis in 1847. Jotham Horton had returned as early as 1851. Why should the Wesleyan Methodist church continue when its primary reason to exist is gone?

There were still reasons to stay separate. In 1860, B. T. Roberts had been pushed out for his sustained critique of Methodism's increasing worldliness. He founded the Free Methodist Church, whose name opposes the way Methodism was increasingly adopting the "pay for your pew" fundraising method. In the more "modern" Methodist churches, you could tell who had money by where they sat. Just like the seats at a concert, you paid more to get closer to the front.

When you look at the cultural forces at work here, Methodism is becoming less and less a church for the common person and more and more a middle-upper class church. More than anyone else, Bishop Matthew Simpson was responsible for this change. He was proud of the increasing affluence of Methodists and he was a spiritual advisor Abraham Lincoln. The old story about the Pope who shows the grandeur of a church and says, "No longer do we have to say, 'Silver and gold have I none.'" The response of course was, "But can we still say then 'Rise up and walk'?"

Statements about avoiding showiness in adornment were toned down. Kevin Watson tells a story about how proud Bishop Simpson was that his wife and home were praised for their obvious culture and sophistication by polite society (Doctrine 215). Methodism had finally arrived.

Roberts was thus being countercultural when he insisted on the values of the roots of Methodism as a church that lived with the poor and did not just minister to the poor. In a couple posts, we will see that the notion that social programs are "liberal" or helping the poor is somehow unevangelical is completely foreign to the Wesleyan tradition. Those sentiments are an infection from twentieth century cultural forces. B. T. Roberts critiqued the "New School" Methodism of Simpson and others. 

In the contemporary landscape of evangelical Christianity, it is common to associate a concern for the poor with liberalism. This is deeply ironic since it is a pervasive, core biblical value. For the Wesleyan tradition it is deeply ironic because it is such a pervasive and core value of Wesley and Wesleyan history. How did we get here? I can think of three primary cultural forces that have led us to this place:

1. Remnants of the fight against a social gospel in the early twentieth century (more to come).
2. Reaction to the fight against communism in the twentieth century and the virtual enshrinement of capitalism as a Christian value.
3. The fusion of evangelicalism with Republicanism. Since FDR and LBJ were Democrats, their initiatives must be evil.

The Salvation Army itself is a Wesleyan church that started in England in the 1800s and transplanted to America in the 1880s. These examples should suffice to prompt reflection on the way our tradition may have been tossed around by Christian cultural forces that are not only thoroughly unbiblical but also quite unwesleyan. We can debate how best to implement that value in society, but the value itself is uncontestable.  

2. What kept the Wesleyan Methodists together in the late 1800s? No doubt its presbyterian church organization was still a plus -- versus the episcopal structure of the MEC. I might add that from where I sit, it was the bishops of the Methodist church of the 1800s that steadily led it off course. The WMC had lay representation while the Methodist church did not. Adam Crooks would take the lead moving forward after Lee and others had left.

Some of the values that we might put in the category of social justice (really biblical justice) continued in the WMC in the late 1800s.

The WMC ordained its first woman preacher in 1861, Mary Wills in the Illinois conference. Nevertheless, cultural forces would prevail for a brief period from 1879-91 when women were limited to the role of liscensed minister -- a secondary level of ordination. After 1891, however, the church returned to its core "Pentecostal" values and women were allowed to be ordained on any level to which God might call her. 

The church has never looked back sense. It has been counter-cultural -- including counter American church culture -- in its full support of women in ministry. This is an important point. There are cultural forces in the American church pushing us away from women in ministry right now. For the first 100+ years of our existence, we were countercultural in terms of the broader culture and American church culture. It is easy to be deceived into thinking our support of women in ministry is liberal, but we were ordaining women 100 years before the modern feminist movement.  

Of course, even though the ordination of women is on the books and taking place regularly, women find a hard time finding a church. Because a local church ultimately gets to decide, grass roots prejudices can ultimately trump the church's official values and they often do. The smaller the unit of the church, the easier it is for whachadoodle to prevail. The more of the church represented, the more likely it is for the Spirit to prevail.

Wesleyans stood for the empowerment of former slaves in the Reconstruction period. They opposed Andrew Johnson's support of Black Codes in the south and his veto of a federal Civil Rights bill. They opposed the newly formed KKK. The Indiana Conference opposed segregation. 

But culture would eventually impinge on the church in this area. In 1891, African-American Wesleyans were segregated into their own districts. This was done primarily for pragmatic reasons, but it fit the decade when Plessy vs. Ferguson would enshrine "separate but equal" in the broader American culture (1896). 

3. One social issue that played a prominent role in this period is the temperance movement. The WMs required abstinence of all its members, the first American denomination to do so. Interestingly, one of the founders of the WM church, Orange Scott, had a patent for an engine that ran on alcohol, which is how the statement that alcohol could be used for mechanical purposes got into the Discipline.

I might add that membership from Wesley through this period was understood to require a certain lifestyle. You committed to that lifestyle from the very beginning of becoming a member and a person was regularly held accountable. The recent shift in Wesleyan membership philosophy to "say yes and aspire to change later" is a fundamental change in Wesleyan ecclesiology. It's another example of American church culture changing our ecclesiology without us even knowing it. We say it's the Bible, but it's really culture. 

Our opposition to drinking was no doubt heavily influenced by the havoc that drinking often brought to families. In particular, an alcoholic husband might drink away a pay check, get involved in a relationship he shouldn't, or become abusive at home. Wesley himself had given warnings about the dangers of drinking.

At the same time, there were cultural factors hiding here too. Waves of immigrants from Ireland and Italy -- Catholics, no less -- made it easy to hide prejudice under the guise of morality. This is a constant trick of the Devil. I say I am against x, a clear moral issue. But what I am hiding -- perhaps even from myself -- is y, an underlying group dynamic, prejudice, or hateful attitude.

4. As the 1800s waned, a focus on personal holiness would steadily replace social concern as a focus of the Wesleyan Methodists. This was not conscious. We are seldom conscious of shifts like these. But the holiness preaching that was the core of my childhood, was shaped in the holiness movement of the late 1800s/early 1900s.

More than anyone else, the heart of this shift lands at the door of Phoebe Palmer (1807-74). What is funny is that I never heard her name until seminary or even later. This person who shaped the holiness preaching of my youth was unknown to a century of preachers who thought they were simply preaching the Bible.

What Palmer taught was a kind of "name-it-claim-it" version of entire sanctification. Christ has already done the work. You just need to claim it. Testify to it even if you don't feel like anything has happened. She wrote her book, The Way of Holiness, in 1843.

Now I did not grow up with that exact formula, although it seems similar to the way the Nazarene Church currently understands entire sanctification, where the event is largely reduced to a consecration of yourself to God. The part that I grew up with is the event focus. Keith Drury called it "two-tripism" in his Holiness for Ordinary People. You go to the altar to get saved. Then you go back to get sanctified.

Palmer called this approach to entire sanctification a "shorter way." In some respects, she was reclaiming Wesley's approach to sanctification in his sermon, "The Scripture Way of Salvation." Wesley waivered throughout his life on the timing of sanctification. In his more pessimistic moments, he thought a few might be sanctified around the time of death. But as this sermon indicates, there were times when he thought it might happen sooner.

The crucial element that was missing from Palmer's equation was waiting on the Lord. We cannot force the Holy Spirit to come on our lives by an act of our will. The movement of the Spirit is a matter of God's choosing. It is not that God plays games or doles out the Spirit whimsically -- we should assume that God wants to give us the fullness of the Spirit and in fact is the one leading us to seek it. Still, it is God's choice as to timing, not ours.

Watson talks about a similar shift that was taking place during this era from a sense of prevenient grace to a sense of "free will." In prevenient grace, the Spirit prepares the way for us to come to Christ. Although our wills are an essential element in the equation, the entire process is empowered by the Spirit. By contrast, the idea of free will suggests that I can come to Christ at any time because I have the power within me. This is a corruption of Wesleyan (and orthodox) understanding -- one that fits with American culture.

Chris Bounds has described the current Wesleyan view of sanctification as a "middle way" in Holiness. It is neither a "done deal at a time of my choosing" (Palmer) nor a "maybe a few lucky ones right before you die" (Wesley in his pessimistic moments and broader Methodism). It is rather a "give it all to the Lord and wait for his movement."

5. What Palmer facilitated was an event-focused entire sanctification. In broader Methodism, entire sanctification had come to be seen as a gradual process throughout one's Christian life. Wesley's sense that you could have an experience of the fullness of the Spirit had been lost to some extent. Palmer rekindled that flame.

One key element in this equation was the fusing of the idea of entire sanctification with the experience the disciples had on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2. This is not the way that John Wesley had preached entire sanctification. This innovation in Wesleyan thinking comes rather from John Fletcher, an Anglican minister who was part of Wesley's movement in England in the 1700s. Larry Wood of Asbury Seminary has argued that Wesley knew of Fletcher's innovation.

This equation of the Spirit-fillings in Acts with entire sanctification would become a powerful preaching tool in the late 1800s and 1900s. Here was a clear biblical narrative that could be preached. The disciples were already saved but they needed to be sanctified, which happened at Pentecost. The believers at Samaria in Acts 8 had been baptized, but they needed to be entirely sanctified. The followers of John the Baptist had been saved in Acts 19, but they needed to be sanctified.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the meaning of the Spirit-fillings in Acts, and Bob Lyon of Asbury Seminary did the careful exegetical work to show it in 1979. Practically speaking, though, this was quite a blow to holiness preaching. Holiness is harder to conceptualize and preach without such a clear narrative framework. I personally think Acts 4 can still be used, but Melvin Dieter would blame Lyon for a sharp decline in holiness preaching, belief, and emphasis in the late 1900s.

6. The 1800s saw a hermeneutic in America that did not distinguish sharply between the laws and practices of ancient Israel and the way the New Testament teaches believers are not "under the law." Little distinction was made between what is sometimes called the "ceremonial law" of the Old Testament and what God expects of Christians today.

This sense was not applied consistently, of course. Christian groups did not practice animal sacrifice, for example. Most Christian groups did not give up eating pork or follow the Old Testament food laws. However, Seventh Day Adventists are a good example of an extreme version of this dynamic. They do not eat pork, and they do follow the Old Testament food laws. Similarly, they worship on Saturday, which is of course the biblical day of the Sabbath.

This was not Paul's hermeneutic, of course. He did not consider the Jewish Sabbath as binding on Gentile believers (Rom. 14:5-6; Col. 2:16). It was however a Puritan practice. Keeping the Sabbath was an important part of the Wesleyan tradition until the late 1900s. A person was not supposed to work, buy, or sell on Sunday. Even today, there is a strong emphasis on Sabbath in the Wesleyan Church, although the emphasis is on rest rather than a more rigid sense of a specific day with specific prohibitions. These are part of our cultural heritage more than a biblical mandate -- and of course it is a very helpful, beneficial, and hopefully spiritual practice as well. 

I grew up with a number of proof-texts from the Old Testament in use to justify certain practices. For example, women were not to wear pants or slacks because of Deuteronomy 22:5. Mustaches were inappropriate because of Leviticus 19:27. There was no sense that some of this legislation might have been directed at ancient Israel. There just wasn't that level of hermeneutical sophistication.

The tithe entered into Wesleyan practice as part of this hermeneutic in the 1920s and, of course, it helped solved the perennial problem of funding the church's activities. In 1923, the WM church made tithing its recommended approach to funding the church. At first, many were resistant to the tithe -- not because it asked too much but because they thought it might foster an attitude of "God gets 10% and I get the rest." Rather, as Ron Blue has put it, God owns it all. 

However, it would seem today that 10% gets Christians moving in the right direction from where they are. It all belongs to God, and there are offerings to be given beyond 10%. But even seeing 10% would be a dream for a lot of churches.

2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection

The series continues: "A History of Wesleyan Ideology." What ideological and cultural forces have converged to shape The Wesleyan Church as we know it today. The picture to the left is Orange Scott, one of the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection.

The previous posts have been:

Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking 

2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s

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1. It is difficult to know what you would have done or thought if you had lived at another point in time. I know that if the current me was transported back to the 1840s, I would leave the Methodist Episcopal Church to be part of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection (WMC) in 1843. Taking one step back, if you took my current values and transported them back to the 1840s in America, I would support the abolition of slavery. I'm not sure what I would have thought was the best method to go about it.

But so much of who we are is a product of our specific history that I'm not sure how much we can say about what we would do or be in a different time and place. If you were born in India 200 years ago, you would very likely be a Hindu, right? If I were born 180 years ago in Georgia, I would likely be pro-slavery. The bottom line is that, if I were born with the same body in a different time and place, I would just very likely be a significantly different person in terms of what I believed. 

I do think that Orange Scott, Luther Lee, LaRoy Sunderland, Jotham Horton, and Lucius Matlock were perfectly reasonable to withdraw from the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) in 1843.

2. Wesley had urged the abolition of slavery in England, although he didn't live to see it. He called American slavery "the vilest that ever saw the sun." The original MEC in the U.S. had opposed slavery. But in the intervening years, the leadership of the MEC had tried to keep the peace by softening its stance toward slaveholding. They also didn't want to put anything in the way of the phenomenal growth they were experiencing.

We've already mentioned that the MEC would split in 1844 into north and south when a southern bishop who owned slaves was asked to step down. Perhaps the WMC would not have happened if that event had happened sooner. In fact, Horton would quickly rejoin the northern MEC. After the Civil War, Lee and Matlock would too, feeling that the WMC had achieved its mission. 

But the 1840 General Conference was particularly offensive to these abolitionists. They were censured for sowing seeds of disunity in the church by speaking out against slavery (while conferences that explicitly stated that slavery was not a moral evil were not addressed). A gag rule was passed forbidding the topic from being discussed at any Annual Conference or General Conference. Black people were prohibited from testifying in church trials in states where they could not testify in state courts. The church officially supported the relocation of slaves to Africa.

There seemed little choice for these men who saw this as the moral issue of the moment but to withdraw and continue the movement elsewhere. One of the mottos of the new WMC was "first pure, then peaceable," and the paper they started was the True Wesleyan (as opposed to the "fake" ones in the MEC). Them's fighting words. This is familiar rhetoric from any group that separates over what they see as a matter of principle to be faithful to the essential values of their tradition. The same language could be used by the Global Methodist Church today.

Indeed, Kevin Watson (Doctrine, Spirit & Discipline 185) points out that the very name "Wesleyan Methodist" was a slam at the MEC. Up to that point, the name Methodist was equivalent to Wesleyan. By taking the name Wesleyan Methodists, they were suggesting that the mainstream Methodists were no longer Wesleyan because of their appeasement on the issue of slavery. 

3. I don't blame them for leaving. The 1840 General Conference more or less said, "If this is a concern to you, shut up or leave the church." By temperament, I think I would have leaned gradualist if I were transported back in time to the north. These were those who wanted to abolish slavery step by step over time. I would have wanted to keep the peace until it just wasn't feasible. 

Lincoln started off that way, but the situation forced his hand. Similarly, the MEC ended up splitting anyway. Sometimes an opposing side is never going to change its mind. Sometimes that ends up in war. Sometimes your opposition wins and you lose. Sometimes you have to make a decision and face whatever the fallout is. If your position is the one with the wind of history behind it, eventually the other side dies off (see Thomas Kuhn).

Gradualism failed. The South just wasn't going to budge on this issue, ever.

4. Orange Scott and later Luther Lee were the key leaders of the new "connection." (The best source of course for the founding of the Wesleyan Methodist Church is Bob Black and Keith Drury's, The Story of the Wesleyan Church.) It was called a "connection" at this point rather than a "church," although for all intents and purposes, it was a church. (It would not be called a church officially until 1891.) 

There were two main issues in its founding. We've already touched extensively on the main one -- opposition to slavery. The other was the Methodist episcopacy. The new church would neither have bishops nor be a purely congregational church. It would use a "middle" structure -- a presbyterian one.

Notice how all three of these structures fit variously well in different cultures. An episcopal structure mirrors cultures with kings and queens, where the leader is there for life and wields immense power. A congregational structure fits American individualism well, where each local church is its own king. The presbyterian model fits the US and Western democracies well, where we have elections for leaders and leaders have significant but not absolute power. 

From a philosophical standpoint, I would argue that this "representational democracy" pattern, with a Constitution to set up the system and appropriate boundaries, has been the most successful in all of history. It has the most checks and balances. It is most likely to play out and preserve Judeo-Christian values in my opinion. 

Those who say, "It's not mentioned in the Bible" are usually unreflective of how biblical structures also were incarnated for their times as well. The Bible gives us principles. It doesn't ever say, "And if you ever get to decide on a governmental or church structure in the 21st century, here's what it should look like." We have to take the principles and play them out in different times and places.

There is a generally unnoticed section in the Wesleyan Discipline called "Elementary Principles." They are an artifact of the founding of the WMC, borrowed directly from the Methodist Protestant Church that split off in 1830. I have never heard anyone refer to them in any significant way. In terms of usage, they are like an appendix or a coccyx that is there but doesn't really do anything. Historical documents sometimes have things like these in them that can suddenly become very important if they somehow come into play in a political moment. They were of great meaning at the time when these individuals were protesting the abuses of power in the MEC.

So the new church would have no bishops. Offices would be elected but would not be held for life. A local church would also vote on whether they wanted a proposed pastor. Church bodies would have a parity between ministerial and lay delegation. There would be the equivalent of a trust clause.

5. The late Donald Dayton wrote a book called, Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage that should probably be required reading for anyone becoming a Wesleyan pastor. The title has a story of its own. In the mid-twentieth century, the word evangelical was largely taken over by a movement involving Billy Graham and forces like Christianity Today. It was and remains a heavily Calvinist-centered movement. More on that in three posts down the line.

When Dayton first wrote the book in 1976, he wanted to point out that the line of evangelicalism in the 1800s largely did not run through the academics of Princeton that I call the "Princeton Calvinists." These were individuals like Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and B. B. Warfield. In fact, these individuals never referred to themselves as evangelicals.

The original "evangelicals" in anything like the modern sense were people like John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards in the 1700s. Two of these were Calvinists, but what made them evangelicals was the way that they preached widely that individuals needed to have conversion experiences. Wesley used the term in reference to individuals who believed you could have an experience of justification by faith. Bebbington's four-fold definition fails because he doesn't take into account the fact that the referents of language change over time (see earlier post).

In short, the line of evangelicalism ran through people like Asbury, Peter Cartwright, Charles Finney, and D. L. Moody -- the revivalists of the 1800s. In the late 1800s, many of them were holiness folk. The "respectable" founders of neo-evangelicalism in the mid-twentieth century weren't so keen on these "emotional" types. Indeed, George Marsden and Mark Noll basically snubbed them in their treatments, calling them "fundamentalists" rather than true evangelicals. I'll unravel that skew in a few posts.

6. The individuals that Dayton covers in his book -- including the early Wesleyan Methodists -- were radicals for the time. They were abolitionists and champions of women's rights. If they were transported back in time, many Wesleyans today would consider them "woke liberals." They were social activists, "social justice warriors," if you would. Orange Scott and Luther Lee would have supported the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s if they were brought forward in time. 

They were post-millennials. That is, they believed that the church age more or less was the millennium. They were optimistic about changing the world to become more and more like the kingdom before Christ returned. The idea of a rapture or a Tribulation as things get worse and worse didn't really exist yet. That comes onto the scene in the late 1800s in the next post.

Some of these Wesleyan Methodists went into the south before the Civil War and preached abolition. Adam Crooks responded to a call to pastor a church in North Carolina in the 1840s, a perilous time. His church was called "Freedom's Hill," which is currently on the campus of Southern Wesleyan University. What a privilege and responsibility SWU has to steward that heritage.

The story of Micajah McPherson is often told. During the Civil War he was lynched and left for dead. But those who lynched him wanted to lynch more people, so they came back for the rope before he was truly dead. He would survive and serve in that church for another thirty years. Daniel Worth would spend the winter of 1859 in a cold cell in North Carolina for preaching abolition. Talk about counter-cultural! Black and Drury point out that Lincoln was too gradualist for these radicals (63-64).

Mark Noll wrote a book on the hermeneutics of this period (Civil War as a Theological Crisis). It is very relevant to debates over complementarianism today. The Princeton Calvinists of this period argued from the household codes that slaves were to obey their masters. They argued that it was unbiblical to be an abolitionist, much as contemporary complementarians are arguing that it is unbiblical to be an egalitarian. 

The Wesleyan Methodists in effect argued that one had to consider first what the overarching principles of Scripture were. Meanwhile, you had to consider the historical context of passages like the household codes and weigh them in the light of the unchanging, overarching core principles of Scripture. The Wesleyan Methodists strongly argued that in Christ there was "neither slave nor free." They saw the trajectory of Philemon as pointing toward the liberation of Onesimus.  

This is an important point. It is common for the person arguing from a clobber verse to accuse others of being unbiblical. In reality, the conflict may be between a verse-oriented hermeneutic versus a whole-Bible hermeneutic. It may be an argument of the letter versus the Spirit. In the end, these are hard debates that various communities of faith just have to wrestle through.

7. Luther Lee would famously preach the sermon at the first official ordination of a woman in the United States in 1853 (although Richard Allen of the AME church had given permission to Jarina Lee to preach in 1819). Lee's sermon is just as relevant today as it was then. Wesleyans also remember that the organizing meeting of the women's rights movement in America took place in a Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.

The rights in question were primarily the right to vote, something that wouldn't happen until 1920. What was counter-cultural then at the time? The movement for women to be able to vote clearly went strongly against the culture of the time. 

Did all Wesleyan Methodists agree? Almost certainly not. For example, the WM pastor at Seneca Falls did not unlock the church. Oversight? They had to crawl in a window to open it up.

But Lee and others saw the Pentecostal principle. Whether you are a slave or a free person, black or white, a woman or a man, the Holy Spirit fills each person equally. Each person has equal value in God's sight. Experience demonstrates that the Spirit can speak and lead equally through all types of individuals. Doesn't it quench the Spirit to box people in based on such externals? Why not let God decide whom he calls?

8. A couple other tidbits from these early days. Few people know that Wheaton College was actually founded by the Wesleyan Methodists, as was Adrian College. However, the WMs did not succeed with the financial aspects of those schools and so they were sold to other groups.

Another issue of some controversy had to do with membership in secret societies. This was a big deal in the mid-1800s. Such organizations had a strong cult-like flavor to them and expected a person's primary loyalty. It looked very fishy and seemed to conflict with the church being a person's primary allegiance. One of the founders of the WMC would leave (Sunderland) over this issue. I believe he eventually left the faith.

2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s

This is a series titled, "A History of Wesleyan Ideology." The goal is to look at the ideological and cultural forces that have converged to shape The Wesleyan Church as we know it today. The picture to the side is that of circuit rider Francis Asbury.

The previous posts have been:

Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking 

With this post, we begin our journey through the founding and early years of The Wesleyan Methodist Church, which was founded in 1843.

1. It would be easy for Wesleyans to ignore the years from Wesley's death in 1791 to the founding of The Wesleyan Methodist Connection in 1843. But these years were when the Americanization of Wesley began. In these years, American culture began to shape Wesley's founding ideas. How can we fully know what the Wesleyan Methodist Church (WM) was in its beginnings if we do not know what it was reacting to and what it continued from what was before?

When we think of the WM founding, our minds immediately go to the issue of slavery, and that was the biggest factor. But it wasn't the only one. Wesleyan Methodists were just one of several groups that also had problems with the way the Methodist Episcopal Church was led -- including its failure to include non-ministers in its decision-making at that time.

Still, in the end, the Wesleyan Methodists withdrew (and to some extent were pushed out) over the refusal of the broader Methodist Church to take a "Wesley-an" stand against slavery. Instead, the hierarchy tried to smooth over tensions between northern and southern Methodism. Like some efforts on a national level during that period to hold the nation together, Methodism made concessions to slavery in the early decades of the 1800s to try to hold the church together.

It didn't work anyway. Southern Methodism would split from northern Methodism in 1844, the year after the WM Connection was formed. At the 1844 General Conference, a bishop from Georgia was asked to step down for being a slave owner. The result was the biggest split in the Methodist church yet. The ME Church South would remain separate until 1939, when north and south reconnected to form the Methodist Church.

2. The Methodist Episcopal Church was effectively founded in 1784 at the famed "Christmas Conference." John Wesley, who had never intended to form a church, finally recognized that the political separation between Britain and the Americas might require a distinct church in America. He ordained Thomas Coke a "superintendent" in England. Then Coke came to America and ordained Francis Asbury in Baltimore. Both were British. 

Wesley had opposed the Revolutionary War for several reasons. He did not believe Methodists should participate in it. However, Wesley was a realist. What was done was done.

Similarly, Wesley thought it was a mistake for Asbury to take the title of bishop. He preferred for the leadership to be "superintendents." But Asbury preferred bishop, and the Christmas Conference voted him such. 

From where Wesleyans sit today, this was a mistake. The power of the bishopric in the Methodist church has arguably been a constant problem throughout its history. Indeed, the recent separation of the Global Methodist Church has given ample examples of crafty bishops using their power to manipulate congregations and to circumvent the Methodist Discipline.

Bishops in the Methodist Church are elected for life. At the time when the WM Church was founded, there was no lay voice in who was chosen. Bishops had little to no accountability. The WM Church was not the first split that took place in those early decades of Methodism. In 1790, the Republican Methodist Church was founded in part because of a lack of lay representation in church leadership.

In 1830, the Methodist Protestant Church withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church over the issue of governance and the failure of several attempts to include lay representation in church governance. When the WM Church was finally founded, its leaders would be superintendents, not bishops, and there would be an emphasis on parity. The concept of parity is that there be equal numbers of ministerial and lay delegates to its conferences on a district and general level.

The Methodist Protestant Church would also be part of the merger in 1939 when north and south came back together.

3. When we think about cultural trends, clearly democracy and individual liberty were key cultural elements in the American culture of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Americans didn't like monarchs. Francis Asbury in the end was British. He was more comfortable with the idea of a king.

So, it is no coincidence that there would be a push within American Methodism for non-ministerial representation and for what we might call a "presbyterian" form of church governance. In this regard, the "congregational" form of governance such as in the Baptist church is consummately American in that regard, where each local church runs its own show. "Freedom of conscience" in the Methodist Protestant Church and "soul freedom" in the Baptist church resonated strongly with American culture.

Nevertheless, the presbyterian form -- where representatives are chosen to conference and leaders are elected to serve for a fixed amount of time -- seems to combine the advantages of other forms of governance while mitigating their weaknesses. This is of course why western representational democracies have been so successful. They build in a balance of power.

The US has a single executive. This has some of the efficiency of a monarch but his or her tenure in office is not permanent. Every four years the leader is reviewed by the people. In much of the history of The Wesleyan Church, it has had multiple General Superintendents. This especially made sense in the age when travel and communication was not so easy. 

The WM church did have a single General Superintendent for many years in Roy Nicholson, but it ground him to a pulp and he strongly advised against it. When the WC recently went to a single General Superintendent in JoAnne Lyon, Lee Haines stood up and advised against it, mentioning Nicholson. Nevertheless, it has worked under Lyon and Schmidt, not least because of a delegation of authority. (I suspect Nicholson was more of a funnel.) These also have been two selfless individuals whose hearts are in the right place.

I personally remain uncertain whether it is ideal to have only one General Superintendent. What would happen if a less godly individual was chosen, someone who was crafty in their wielding of power? We like to think that those the church chooses will always be saintly and wise, but looking back through history, I'm not sure we can always depend on it.

The counterbalance of a strong General Board is thereby important. At present, the collective power of the district superintendents of the church seems rather strong as well as a counterbalance. 

In the end, it's about informed representation as well as proper checks and balances. These are consummately Western cultural values, yes. But they have been proven effective thus far. They are not foolproof but, as Winston Churchill famously said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others."

In the end, the form of leadership the church takes will likely have a lot to do with the culture in which it is situated. The early church retained some Jewish structures (like groups of elders), but it also had free-ranging charismatic leaders like Paul. These leadership structures fit the first century. It is no surprise that the forms of leadership under different cultures will be different. It fits the incarnational principle. It would be foolish to try to model a form that fit well in the first century but would be self-defeating today.

4. Another feature of some of the early pullouts was the naive hermeneutic that thinks "We're just following the Bible." The early 1800s saw the Cane Ridge revivals and the Stone-Campbell movements that were sick of all the divisions in Christianity and all the different groups that were emerging at the time. Their solution was to go back to the Bible -- "No creed but Christ; no book but the Bible."

This sounds good and is certainly well-intentioned. The problem is that the polyvalence of the Bible stands at the very heart of matter. The fact that the Bible can be interpreted differently by different individuals is the core reason for the endless multiplication of denominations in America. The Stone-Campbell movement is a case in point. It is almost comical how this movement gave birth to so many different denominations that weren't supposed to be denominations but were just following the Bible -- the Christian Church, Churches of Christ (instrumental and non-instrumental), Disciples of Christ, etc. The rate of multiplication for this "no book but the Bible" tradition is a consummate example of the fact that there is always more involved than the Bible. If you don't realize this dynamic, it runs wild and unchecked.

American individualism also played a role. Not only was it each group deciding what they thought the Bible meant. In America, it was every individual deciding what the Bible means. The 1800s are a case study in charismatic individuals going off and starting their own church. Most of these would stay roughly within the lines. But then you would also have Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and many others.

5. James Madison called slavery America's original sin. The slave trade started in Europe and was pernicious, but it seemed the hardest to get rid of in America, no doubt because the southern economy was built on top of it.

The founders of the Wesleyan Methodist connection preached against it and lobbied strongly against it in the Methodist Episcopal Church. In this, they were continuing the position that Wesley had taken in England before his death. The leadership of the ME church found them counterproductive, zealots. Just as America had its "gradualists," who wanted to phase out slavery, so many northern Methodists fell into this camp. 

Were the founders of Wesleyan Methodism zealots? I suspect they were. I suspect they would be strongly resisted by most Wesleyans today. More on that in the next post.

There's also an important distinction between being opposed to slavery and looking down on "Africans" as inferior. There were plenty of people against slavery who were racists of a "softer" sort. (Think for example of the American Colonization Society that wanted to free the slaves and send them back to Africa) The founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion in 1821 largely resulted from the marginalization of black worshippers in Philadelphia and New York City respectively.

I had a conversation with some of my children recently in which I wondered if there were shades of racism -- blatant, soft, and benevolent. We all get the concept of someone who flat-out hates people of another race. But then there are those who have biases that are more subtle. Maybe someone automatically locks their doors when someone of a different color approaches. I call this "soft racism." Then there are those who try to "help those poor people," in effect demeaning another race by assuming they need help. I've heard this called "benevolent racism." One of my children said, "Nope, it's all just racism." :-)

It's clear that the ME leaders of Philadelphia wanted the black worshippers to be in their place. They didn't want them sitting in good seats in church. They didn't want them owning their own church property or serving as elders. Although he resisted it for a long time, eventually, Richard Allen formed the AME church so that blacks in Philadelphia could worship freely and spread the gospel freely. The AME church would grow much faster than the white congregations in Pennsylvania. 

6. The "trust clause" was also a part of early American Methodism, going back to Wesley himself. This is the idea that the district holds the property deeds to local churches. This has been extremely controversial in the split of the United Methodist Church because congregations that wanted to leave in effect had to get permission from the UM church. There was a window when there was a process for exit, but it was (in the minds of some) abruptly closed at the last General Conference, leaving congregations who were more hesitant to leave at first in an uncomfortable situation.

The Wesleyan Church has inherited this practice. It emphasizes the unity and connection of local churches as one body. It makes it hard for schism to happen, where a charismatic figure leads a local church away from the denomination. It gives a tool for the broader church to stem off heresy in a local body. At the moment, the UM debacle has left many Wesleyans afraid of what would happen if the general church became the heretic.

I have mixed feelings about the trust clause. It made sense in Wesley's day because he helped fund the churches. It made sense in the 1800s when the church was largely uneducated and "go start a cult" was in the water. I think it has been a positive feature of Wesleyan colleges. None of the Wesleyan colleges can split off from the church and go its own way. Balance of power and checks and balances are always the name of the game.

At the same time, we should be aware of the cultural impact of hyper-individualism on us and the cult of freedom that is part of America's culture. For Paul, our freedom is from sin, which entails a slavery to righteousness. In Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8-10, Paul emphasizes that my individual freedom is never an excuse to harm or put a stumblingblock in front of others. The New Testament models a corporate interconnectedness and accountability.

The American impulse is for me (or my local church or my denomination) to do it my way. But that is not the biblical way. Beware the gravitational pull of culture on this one

1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking

We finish up our look at Wesley's ideology. Previously in this series:

• Preface
• Wesley and High Protestantism

I was once struck by a book by Harald Lindstrom called Wesley and Sanctification because of the way he shows that there are historical layers to Wesley's thinking. I believe Bud Bence's unpublished dissertation also explored this dynamic (trying to get him to self-publish it). Below let me share some of my sense of a historical "archaeology" of Wesley's thought. 

1. Wesley the Anglo-Catholic

It is well known that, at university, Wesley was part of what they called the "Holy Club" at Oxford. Although it was a nickname given them by others, holiness was also their true aspiration. They read Anglican works like William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life and Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying.

From the standpoint of a Lutheran at the time, these books would likely seem to focus too much on "works." They no doubt would have seemed like a lot of "striving" to live a holy life. In short, they no doubt would have felt a little "Catholic" to a high Protestant. Too much "works righteousness," Luther might have said. Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ was actually written while everyone was still Catholic.

These books also befit Wesley's perfectionist personality. God would use Wesley's perfectionism mightily to bring his organization skills to bear on the Methodist movement. But perfectionism was also a curse to Wesley at times. Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection has struggled at times under that word, perfection. In his A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Wesley would work hard to distinguish this doctrine from Adamic perfection and sinless perfection. 

When you have to explain and re-explain a concept, it's possible that you need to take it back to the shop and give it a little more work. Some of the NT passages with the word perfection in them should probably be translated with the word maturity rather than "perfection." Completely different feel. "Go on into maturity," Hebrews 6:1 is better rendered. I might paraphrase Matthew 5:48 to say something like, "Be complete and love everyone just like your heavenly Father loves everyone."

Personally, Wesley's perfectionist tendencies could lead him to write to his brother at one point in 1766, "I do not love God... I've never believed... I am only an honest heathen." Pish posh. I know that devil of perfectionism, the faith of a servant of God but not a son. Snap out of it Wesley.

Similarly, Chris Bounds has called Wesley's view of sanctification as sometimes being "a longer way." There are places where Wesley said it could happen earlier in life. But he also had his pessimistic moments when he thought it might only be a few people and even then late in life or near death. I wonder if this dynamic reflects the fact that Wesley was never able to completely shake the perfectionism of his personality and early days at Oxford.

A final note on infant baptism. As a good Anglican, Wesley practiced infant baptism. It is hard for a lot of Wesleyans today to understand this practice, but this is largely because of our inability to see the hyper-individualist nature of American culture. Luther and Calvin both practiced infant baptism and saw no conflict between it and the doctrine of justification by faith.

The Wesleyan Methodists practiced infant baptism as well, and it remains a little-known option in the Wesleyan Discipline today. It is no surprise, however, that as Western culture became more and more individualist, it would become difficult for people to see how a corporate body could exercise faith for a child until that child is old enough to exercise faith for him or herself.

In the earliest days of Protestantism, the Anabaptists ("re-baptizers") of Switzerland saw how justification by faith might be correlated with baptism, seeing such a direct connection in the book of Acts. Their new interpretation based in their sense of "Scripture only" would earn them persecution (and sometimes death) by Zwingli.

In America, believer's baptism made perfect sense and would become a hallmark of the American Baptist tradition. It is one of the winds that has blown strongly on the Wesleyan Church. The Reformed Baptist Church of Canada received an assurance that they would not have to baptize infants as part of their agreement to merge with the Wesleyan Methodists in the late 1960s.

2. Wesley and the Moravians

It is hard for us to get our heads around the fact that a good deal of insecurity could attend a Protestant in the 1700s about their eternal destiny. The Roman Church with its sacraments provided somewhat of a guarantee and there was purgatory to get you the whole way if needed. Luther's "justification by faith" made the question of salvation individual. Have you exercised personal faith?

Calvinism taught that salvation was purely a matter of God's choosing. There was nothing you could do to get it. Either you were chosen or you weren't. In Pilgrim's Progress, Christian doesn't know if he's going to make it to heaven until he makes it to heaven. The Puritans lived strict lives in hopes that it meant they were one of the chosen. Someone who lived an ungodly life obviously wasn't chosen.

One of the key features of Wesley, perhaps in fact his greatest contribution, was the notion that you could know that you were saved. Wesley taught an "assurance of salvation." This has become a core feature of American Christianity. You can know you are saved.

Wesley took this concept from the German Pietists. After Oxford, he went to Georgia to be a missionary. But the whole experience caused him to doubt whether he himself was saved. On the way there, some Moravians (German pietists) had a peace in the midst of a storm. Wesley couldn't believe it. How are they so calm? He himself was beset by fear.

It was finally on May 24, 1738 that he had his heart-warming experience on Aldersgate Street. "I felt my heart strangely warmed." It was a moment of assurance. Would Wesley have gone to heaven if he had died before then? I truly believe so. Attempts to align this experience with salvation or sanctification are attempts to make his experience fit our systems. Wesley was filled with the Spirit and given an assurance of his justification. It can happen more than once, but this moment was significant because it was really Wesley's first time. On the other hand, he never mentions the experience again.

This was a key moment in the story of evangelicalism. Assurance of salvation at the moment one is justified by faith is a key hallmark of evangelicalism, and it arguably started here. More below.

I might note that the American Baptist mutation known as eternal security begins here too. The Puritans believed that you would make it to the end if you were one of the elect ("the perseverance of the saints") but they didn't believe you could know if you were one of the elect. The Baptist tradition combined 1) the fact that you could know you were saved with 2) the fact that the elect would persevere. 

Voila! Eternal security. If you are assured of your salvation now, you are elect. And if you are elect, you're going to make it to the end. This is not a biblical concoction but a doctrine shaped in the historical currents of the 1700s.

3. Wesley and Luther

Wesley had his heart-warming experience after attending a Bible study where they had read Luther's Preface to Romans. He probably interpreted this moment as him being justified by faith. Justification has to do with having a right standing before God. It is generally seen at its root as a legal term. It is about being found "not guilty" in the divine court.

Luther himself struggled in the early 1500s with a sense of acceptance before God. He didn't feel like his "works" were good enough. He had a pervasive sense of moral failure before God. God freed him from this bondage by helping him see that Paul taught justification by faith and not by works. God gives us a right standing before him on the basis of Christ's righteousness rather than our own.

Here is the Lutheran layer of Wesley's theology. On the few occasions when Wesley uses the word evangelical, he seems to mean those Protestants who believe in justification by faith.

This, by the way, is a beef I have with David Bebbington's identification of an evangelical as someone who believes in 1) Bible-focus, 2) cross-focus, 3) born-again focus and 4) activism. To beat the dead horse again, what a word means depends on how it is used. Bebbington runs rough shod over five hundred years looking for some universal definition of an evangelical when, in truth, the meaning and emphasis of the term will change over time depending on the context. Evangelical at the moment has a major political component, for example.

Wesley the evangelical focused on getting people to be justified by faith in an experience. The other elements may be true of him too, but they're not what made him an evangelical in the 1700s.

Wesley took the concept of "imputed righteousness" from Luther. When we are justified, we have no righteousness of our own. It is "imputed" to us. However, Wesley would go on to teach that God thereafter imparted true righteousness to us as well. We actually become righteous. 

For Luther, the whole of our Christian life was God looking at Jesus rather than our continuing sin. As Luther put it, we are "both righteous and sinner as long as we are always repenting." Wesley believed that God wanted to do more than this in our lives (and so did Paul).

4. Wesley, Augustine, and Calvin

As a New Testament scholar, I believe that Wesley anticipated some of the insights that came in the late 1900s under what was called "a new perspective on Paul." However, Wesley remained a child of his time. He made modifications to the path of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Arminius, but I can't help but feel that he was not able to get out from under them. He would say at one point that he was a "hair's breadth from Calvinism," for example.

This is some of the perceived tension, I suspect, between Ken Collins at Asbury Seminary and Randy Maddox at Duke. Collins largely takes Wesley as he is. Maddox seems to want to construct a Wesleyan theology that is not as bound by Wesley's own categories. I welcome redirection there.

Here are some ways in which I believe it is possible to construct a Wesleyan theology that is truer to Paul and that reformulates some of the "baggage" Wesley retained from this Augustinian heritage:

a. thorough vs. absolute depravity

Roger Olson has gone to great lengths to show that Arminius (and Wesley) were not Pelagians or semi-Pelagians. They did not believe that a person could come to God in his or her own power. It required God's grace, God's prevenient grace that goes before and empowers us to make choices.

That theology makes sense to me. However, it is a connecting of the dots outside of Scripture. Paul does not articulate a full-blown theology on the subject of election and free will. Calvin connected the dots (outside of Scripture) one way, Arminius connected them (outside of Scripture) another way. So we thank you, Olson, even if I'm not too bothered by those who might accuse a Wesleyan of Pelagianism.

You may regularly see in these pages the remnants of my Pilgrim Holiness sentimentalities. I am not bothered too much by the old controversies of church history. I am open to the Spirit bringing new and fresh insights. As I recall, we didn't even emphasize the Trinity very much growing up. We prayed "in Jesus' name." To this day, it feels a little Catholic for me to say, "in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." 

It seems to me that Paul expresses a thorough depravity in Romans 3 rather than an absolute depravity. We are morally flawed. You might even say every aspect of who we are is affected. But Paul never says that every bit of us is depraved. Indeed, our Augustinian heritage makes more of Adam than Paul himself does on balance. I am told that the expression "total depravity" can be interpreted in this thoroughgoing way as opposed to an absolute way.

Wesley's sense of the image of God as the 1) natural, 2) moral, and 3) political also goes well beyond anything the biblical text says. In Genesis 1 the image of God is largely political -- it refers to humanity's rule over the creation as God rules over all. In other places, it simply is used to suggest that we should treat other humans with respect because they are a reflection of God. 

So while Wesley's thoughts on the image of God can bring insights into our human condition, they are extensively extra-biblical, going way beyond anything the biblical texts actually say.

b. sin "like" Adam rather than "in" Adam

Augustine's misinterpretation of Romans 5:12 is notorious. (He couldn't read Greek, after all.) He took it to mean that we all sinned in Adam. Thus we have the guilt of original sin before we ever commit an act of sin in this life.

This is not what Paul teaches. Paul does not teach that we have guilt from Adam's sin. Rather, we have guilt because we sin like Adam. One of Wesley's justifications for infant baptism was to be cleansed of original sin. Completely extra-biblical. 

The original sin was the sin of Adam and Eve, but Paul never taught that we have original sin.

c. Sin power vs. sin nature

Wesley inherited Augustine's sense that we have a sin nature. Our human nature is corrupted and our desires are malformed. But this is not what Paul actually teaches. In fact, in Romans 7, the "I" wants to do the good. It is not malformed into desiring the bad (see Krister Stendahl). 

Paul expresses the sinful human condition in terms of a conflict between our spirits (where our "I" resides) and our "flesh," our bodies under the power of Sin. In Romans 7, the person Paul is dramatizing wants to do the good in their spirit, but they are foiled by the power of Sin over their flesh. Receiving the Holy Spirit is the antidote. Now a person's spirit has the power to do the good they want to do.

You'll note that the NIV2011 withdrew its previous language of "sinful nature" for the more accurate term "flesh." My flesh is my "skin under the power of Sin." For Paul, Sin is a power over me. It is not a feature of a corrupted nature inside of me. It is an "accidental" property of my default humanity rather than an "essential" one that is fundamental to our nature.

This distinction solves a lot of rabbit trails in Wesleyan debates over sanctification over the years. Is our sinful nature suppressed (Keswick) or eradicated (holiness)? Wrong question because it is based on an Augustinian sense of human nature. We are set free from the power of Sin by the Spirit. Yet if we do not continually walk in fellowship with the Spirit, "sin lieth at the door" to come back over our skin. 

d. general satisfaction vs. penal substitution

Wesley inherited from medieval Catholicism the doctrine of penal substitution. Paul taught that Jesus was an atonement for our sins. That is, he satisfied the need for justice. Less developed in Paul is the idea that Jesus took our place. Rather, we get "in" Christ when we receive the Spirit. We participate in his death and resurrection. This is different from a straightforward substitution. Verses like 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Galatians 3:13 seem a little more profound than a simple substitution.

The doctrine of penal substitution in its current form especially goes back to Anselm in the 1000s. He makes it a virtually mathematical equation. You 1) take the total amount of "sin units" that humanity has and will commit that need forgiven and 2) you shoot Jesus with exactly that much punishment on the cross (or when he dips his toes in hell) and, voila, Jesus has substituted for our precise punishment (penal).

Funny how none of this is in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Apparently, the Father has the authority to simply forgive on the spot! So while the satisfaction of justice is in Paul and our participation in his sacrifice is there too, the more precise version of penal substitution that Wesley inherited is not really expressed in the New Testament and probably has more to do with Anselm.

5.  Wesley and the Enlightenment

One of the biggest currents in Wesley's day was the Enlightenment, an emphasis on human reason and objectivity. As needed as it was, the Protestant Reformation had destabilized a sense of security about what was true. This led thinkers like Descartes to ask the question of how we could know what was certain. His famous answer was, "I think; therefore, I am."

A quest for objectivity ensued in European culture. Reason and experience were the two competing paths to truth. A group known as "rationalists' emphasized reason as the path to truth. Another group known as the "empiricists" emphasized gathering evidence (e.g., the scientific method).

The so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral has reason and experience as part of the equation, although situating them under Scripture and including tradition. Notice how the quadrilateral balances all the historical forces of Wesley's day. It grounds knowledge on Scripture in keeping with the Reformation. It does not reject tradition, revealing Wesley's Anglican roots. And it incorporates the two new emphases of "modernism": reason and experience.

There have been recent voices in Methodism (like Billy Abraham) who have tried to purge Methodism of the quadrilateral. They see the elevation of reason and experience at the root of the liberalism of the Methodist Church. Many of them are what I might call "post-liberals." These are postmodern forces within Methodism that want to reclaim faith by doing an end-run around reason, returning to some sort of pre-modern Shangrila. (Alistair MacIntyre's After Virtue and Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self are also important works in this discussion.)

Wesley lived on the cusp of the pre-modern/modern transition. We therefore have to be careful when we quote him in favor of one or the other. He was both. Billy Abraham and others are right to point out that the quadrilateral was a term coined by Albert Outler in the twentieth century, not a term that goes back to Wesley.   

However, it is my conviction that modernism needs to be chastened and reformed, not abandoned. The American Constitution is an artifact of the Enlightenment, and it's pretty good if you ask me. Wesleyan-Arminianism has a good deal of Enlightenment in it as well. The concept of individual freedom over determinism would be a case in point. In my opinion, critical realism is a great approach to knowledge and reality -- but it is in the end a chastened modernist approach.

Wesley's activism fits well within the Enlightenment focus on individual rights as well. The child in the coal mine matters. The slave matters. The same forces that would lead Jeremy Bentham to formulate utilitarianism and Adam Smith to formulate capitalism were driving Wesley to jump on board with social reform in England.

Wesley's relationship with women was somewhat uneven. One of the commitments of the Holy Club was for the men to remain unmarried in keeping with 1 Corinthians 7. They all abandoned this commitment but Wesley's brother Charles unfairly wanted him to keep it. Wesley got driven out of Georgia over a woman. He missed out on love a second time because of his brother. Then he secretly mismarried without telling his brother. That marriage was not a success story.

Nevertheless, in his later years Wesley recognized the giftings of some women in his groups and he gave them the authority to preach and disciple others. This was a major move forward. Wesley often did things that went against his early intuitions. Preaching outside of a church, for example, did not come naturally to this formerly Anglo-Catholic. Empowering women to minister was probably another example of his yielding to the Spirit rather than the biases with which he grew up.

6. Wesley the Organizer

Although it had less to do with ideology, we should mention that Wesley was organized. George Whitefield, the famous evangelist, once noted that his own followers were a "rope of sand" because he did not set up any organization. By contrast, the organized Wesley set up his followers in societies, classes, and bands. He made accountability a key feature. 

The result is that Methodism continued long after his death. For more on leadership lessons we can learn from Wesley, see Mark Gorveatte's Lead Like Wesley. And if you want a more playful overview of Wesley's life and ministry, you can see my biography of Wesley through the voice of his horses: A Horse Strangely Warmed: The Life of John Wesley as Told by His Horses.

1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism

Earlier this week I started a journey through the history of Wesleyan ideology. Today the journey looks to where Wesley was situated in relation to the Protestant Reformation before him. [The image to the side is that of Thomas Cranmer, perhaps the most formative thinker in the formation of the Church of England (or Anglican Church).]

Previous posts:
Preface

1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism

1. Wesley wasn't a heretic, but you might get that impression sometimes. I heard a story once about someone President Barnes of Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU) brought in to evaluate where IWU was ideologically. Apparently, the person's greatest suspicions ended up being about Bud Bence, who is often considered a Wesleyan's Wesleyan. I am sometimes considered a heretic for believing in women in ministry. 

The Wesleyan tradition often looks a little "off" when viewed from what I might call "high Protestantism." Here I chiefly mean the heirs of Martin Luther and John Calvin in the 1500s. Of course, they would no doubt have a similar perspective on any number of other groups like Pentecostals and charismatics as well. Today, America's theology is Baptist more than anything else -- historical Wesleyans can look pretty fishy to them too. 

I would say that Wesley looks a little askew among high Protestants for two chief reasons. First, he was an Anglican, and Anglicanism was a "middle way" between Protestantism and Catholicism. In other words, Wesley can seem a little too Catholic. Second, he was an Arminian, In simple terms, he believed that God gives us some degree of free will. A good deal of Christianity considers that a heresy called "Pelagianism" or "semi-Pelagianism."

2. First, Wesley was an Anglican. The Church of England did not start the way Lutheranism did. In the beginning, Luther opposed the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) because they were taking people's money and promising them years off of purgatory. This flashpoint cascaded into Luther's other positions. So, he rejected the "Apocrypha" as part of the Bible because 2 Maccabees was thought to give support to the idea of purgatory. Similarly, salvation must purely be on the basis of faith not works because good works (like paying money to the church) couldn't help save your soul. 

As is often the case, Luther's ideology directly followed a concrete, practical situation rather than being some purely biblical or theological discovery. Life led him to focus on certain passages and he almost certainly took them beyond what they actually said.

The Church of England started differently. King Henry VIII disagreed with Luther's theology. In fact, he wrote a treatise against Luther and his "Protestants." BUT Henry wanted a divorce, and the RCC wouldn't grant one because Spain was breathing down the Pope's neck -- and the wife Henry wanted to divorce was the daughter of the king of Spain. 

So after England's separation from the RCC, the Anglican church still had more of a Catholic flavor than the Lutheran or Reformed churches did. Its original theologians would ironically burn at the stake at the hands of "bloody Mary" for being too Protestant (even though they still had a lot in common with Catholicism). Meanwhile, those who resisted the withdrawal would burn at the stake for being too Catholic (even though they were very sympathetic to some of the reforms it made to the RCC).

In the end, the Anglican church came to see itself as a kind of "via media" or "middle way" between Catholicism and high Protestantism. It adopted justification by faith, but in its sacraments and church structure it often still looked a bit Catholic. It continued to use the Apocrypha in worship, and it was more open to works in the life of a believer than Luther by far.

The fact that Wesley was a child of Anglicanism rather than of high Protestantism has probably contributed to some of the "otherness" of Methodism and Wesleyanism within Protestantism. 

3. If you know your history, high Protestantism had four or five "solas" (the Latin word for "only"). 

• Luther's biggest one was 1) sola fide or "by faith alone." Luther taught that "works" play no role in being "justified" before God. We attain a right standing with God based on faith alone. 
• Similarly, our salvation is purely a matter of 2) grace alone (sola gratia). No one can earn or merit salvation.
• Salvation is based on 3) "Christ alone" (solus Christus). There is no other path to God. 
• Everything we must believe is a matter of 4) "Scripture alone" (sola scriptura), and Scripture is clear enough in itself for anyone to see the way (the "perspicuity" of Scripture). You don't need the church to explain it to you or a priest to intercede for you. 
• Finally, a latecomer was the idea that everything is for 5) "God's glory alone" (soli dei gloria).

Of course, it is not enough to say that Wesley affirmed sola fide as Luther and Calvin did. We have to ask how Wesley used those words. For Luther and Calvin, "by faith alone" meant that any effort on our part ("works") plays no role in our salvation whatsoever. For them, this extended to the act of faith itself. For them, we have no part at all in the exercise of faith. God does it for us in us. We are his sock puppets, and he says through our mouths, "I believe" for us.

Works played a much larger role in the equation for Wesley and the Anglicans (e.g., 2 Cor. 5:10). Technically, Wesley believed that works are a result of our justification by grace through faith. They are not the cause of our justification or salvation. But, unlike Luther and Calvin, Wesley believed your works could disqualify you from the prize (1 Cor. 9:27; Wesley, "A Call to Backsliders"). Such a concept played no role in the high Protestantism of Luther or Calvin.  

4. Wesley was thus a "synergist" rather than a "monergist." He believed that our wills worked together with God's will toward salvation. Luther and Calvin were monergists, believing that God alone did all the work. In short, Wesley was an "Arminian."

Arminius was a Dutch theologian who died in 1609. Before he died, he suggested a few tweaks to Calvin's theology. 

• For example, he suggested that God's choosing of us -- our election -- was conditional upon our response. By contrast, "election" was unconditional for Calvin. 
• Arminius believed that Christ died for everyone, while some Calvinists had concluded that Christ only died for the elect ("limited atonement"). 
• While Arminius believed in the "total depravity" of humanity (as did Wesley)...
• ... he taught that the grace of God went before us ("prevenient grace") to make it possible for us to open ourselves to his saving grace and thus cooperate with God's grace. For Calvin, God's grace was "irresistible."
• And for Arminius, it was similarly possible to "fall" from God's grace (Jude 24). Calvinists saw God's grace as irresistible, and if God had chosen you, you would definitely make it to the end.

After Arminius died, the Synod of Dort codified orthodox Calvinism in the TULIP that we have alluded to above, which Arminius (and Wesley) mostly rejected:

• Total depravity -- We can do no good in our own power.
• Unconditional election -- God alone decides who will be saved. We play no real role.
• Limited atonement -- Christ only died for the elect.
• Irresistible grace -- If God has chosen you, you will receive his grace.
• Perseverance of the saints -- If you are chosen, you will make it to the kingdom no matter what.

It is no surprise that Wesley modified the 39 Articles of the Church of England in keeping with his "Arminianism." For example, Wesley removed Article 17 on predestination. Most of his other edits had to do with church structure and toning down the "let's burn them at the stake" feel of others. He passed on 25 of the 39 Articles to the Methodists.

5. In the twenty-five doctrines that Wesley retained, several were in direct continuity with the high Reformation. For example, Article 5 retained Luther's sense of sola scriptura, "Scripture only." Nothing was to be required of a believer that could not be demonstrated in Scripture. Wesley famously aspired to be a "man of one book" (homo unius libri).

Again, if we look to his actual practice, however, Wesley regularly brought into conversation tradition, reason, and experience with Scripture. Scripture was primary, but it was clarified by these other sources of truth, an approach sometimes called prima scriptura. Although the Wesleyan quadrilateral is not a term that Wesley himself coined (it comes from Albert Outler in the twentieth century), it is a fair reflection of his actual practice. The four sides of the quadrilateral are Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.

I am not aware of a place where Wesley directly engaged Luther on the concept of the "perspicuity" of Scripture. The idea of perspicuity is the sense that Scripture is clear and plainly understandable on matters pertaining to salvation. Wesley may have. Here's how Luther put it in his Bondage of the Will in 1525: "The perspicuity of Scripture means that everything necessary for salvation and regarding faith and life is taught in clear language in Scripture." 

The Westminster Confession of 1647 put it this way: "All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them."

Wesley did not pass these sorts of statements into Methodism, and there is no statement of this sort in the Wesleyan Discipline today. However, I think Wesley agreed with them (Arminius did), and I welcome input from those who might know "chapter and verse" in Wesley's works. 

Notice the focus of perspicuity. It does not consider every passage in Scripture to be clear to us. Rather, the path of salvation is clear. The driving force for Luther was again his reaction to Roman Catholicism. His doctrine of Scripture's clarity was meant to indicate that we do not need a priest or the church in order to be saved. Scripture alone is a sufficient enough guide to lead us to salvation.

6. In the Preface, I suggested that Luther's understanding of Scripture was two-dimensional -- primarily literary without historical depth. Unreflectively, he thought the words could be separated from the historical contexts that gave them their first meaning. Like Melanchthon after him, he largely treated meaning as inherent and fixed in words rather than as functions of how they are used at a particular time and place.

He also underestimated the fact that I as a reader ultimately construct the meaning I see in a text. A text can come to have almost as many meanings as the minds that read it. "Meaning is in the eye of the beholder." Paul Tillich in the twentieth century would speak of the Protestant Principle -- the fact that each individual reader is free to interpret the biblical texts suggests that the interpretations of the Bible will multiply endlessly as reader after reader interprets them.

Martin Marty once suggested that there were 20-30,000 different Protestant denominations, almost of all of which think they get their beliefs from the Bible alone. A little reflection suggests that sola scriptura has not resulted in anything like a common understanding of the meaning of most of the Bible. There are three reasons for this multiplicity of interpretations:

• There is the "polyvalence" of individual words and sentences -- words are capable of taking on more than one meaning.
• There is the need to integrate the thought of multiple books together. The Bible does not tell us how to connect James and Paul or Mark and John. Hebrews may tell us what to do with Leviticus, but we may end up overriding Leviticus in the process of listening to Hebrews. The process of integrating the books of the Bible together of necessity takes place outside the biblical texts themselves. In other words, it requires a scaffolding that is outside the Bible alone.
• There is the need to appropriate the ancient meanings of these texts to today. The books do not tell us how to do this. 1 Peter doesn't say, "Here's how to apply these instructions to persecuted believers in the first century to twentieth century America." We have to connect the dots outside the biblical texts. In other words, appropriation requires work that is beyond Scripture alone, work that we have to do ourselves.

The fact that most interpreters of the Bible are unreflective about the role that they (and their traditions) play in integrating and appropriating Scripture sneaks in the chaos that is the myriad conflicting interpretations and applications of the Bible.

And, living before Descartes' epistemological turn in the 1600s, Luther was largely unaware of the fact that when I read a text, it is inevitably my mind that constructs the meaning of that text for me. He saw the meaning as "out there" with little appreciation for the chaos that is our minds inferring meaning.

We can thus see some important clarifications that need to be made to Luther's sense of sola scriptura and the perspicuity of Scripture. For one, the fact that there are tens of thousands of denominations with varying beliefs and interpretations of the Bible suggests that, for us (in contrast to the original audiences), Scripture is far more unclear than we probably realize or acknowledge. Given the lay of the denominational land, this conclusion hardly seems debatable, although many groups insist they are right and everyone else is wrong. Even scholars regularly disagree on the meaning of passage after passage.

7. Here's where we should recognize the essential role of the Holy Spirit. There is a tendency to detach our interpretation of the Bible from the illuminating and inspiring work of the Holy Spirit. This is a serious mistake. After all, it is the prevenient grace of the Spirit that leads us to salvation. The biblical text without the Spirit will not lead me to salvation. It is not "Scripture alone" that leads me to salvation. It is the Spirit working with my spirit.

In the hands of the Spirit, the original meaning of the Bible does not need to be clear to lead me to salvation because the journey to salvation is not primarily an intellectual or cognitive journey. My mind is certainly involved, but the essential features have to do with my "heart" and will. The Spirit can use a stop sign to bring me to salvation assuming that I have the barest knowledge of God and Christ!

I might add that this is a frequent blind spot of apologetics as well. Coming to Christ is not a matter of intellectual argument. We can help remove intellectual obstacles. We can lay the groundwork for the path. But it is the Spirit that always leads the way. It is the Spirit that empowers the will. It is the heart that believes unto salvation (Rom. 10:10).

These refinements of our understanding of the perspicuity of Scripture and these clarifications to the limits of sola scriptura go beyond the hermeneutical understandings of Wesley and the Reformers. They are contemporary insights, as undeniable as they seem to be once they are pointed out and understood. 

The original purpose of sola scriptura was to say that the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was not needed for salvation, which of course is true. Luther asserted that the RCC and its priesthood were not needed to interpret the Bible for any believer. The doctrine was an instrument of separation from the Roman Catholic Church. 

Recent years have suggested that the community of faith is more important in the appropriation of Scripture than the Reformers recognized. For one thing, it was through Old Testament priests, Jewish rabbis, and the Church that God collected these writings into a canon and brought to recognition which books were authoritative as a collection. Without communities of faith searching these texts and worshiping with these texts, we would only have had individual believers with whatever individual scrolls they might have had access to. 

Still, Luther and Zwingli got together in 1529 to see if they could agree on what "Scripture alone" taught about communion. They couldn't agree, not even the first two Protestant interpreters of the Bible. Twelve years after Luther's 95 Theses, sola scriptura in a sense fell apart.

And thus the infinite proliferation of Christian groups all pretending they are just reading "the Bible alone" began. Zwingli would later watch his people drown Anabaptists in the river because the Anabaptists did not think the Bible alone supported infant baptism. "You want to be rebaptized as an adult? I'll rebaptize you!" Apparently, Zwingli could interpret the Bible alone, but no one else could. The statements of faith that are ubiquitous in Christendom are basically churches and Christian organizations trying to nail down what we should take away from the Bible (and to compel their communities to agree). 

I always smile when I think of the various churches of Christ and churches of God that were founded on the idea that they are not denominations. They were founded on the idea that they simply follow the Bible alone. Yet it is clear that they have made decisions about what their group thinks the Bible means. They have made decisions on what structures they think the Bible implies. And, sometimes, their people go full on heretical because that's just their interpretation of the Bible.

Your non-denominational church on the corner isn't fooling anyone. A few questions and we will quickly be able to identify which traditions of American Christianity their leaders and people draw from. They are mostly Baptist without the name, and some of them throw some charismatic movement on top. They are hermeneutically unreflective, more examples of the Protestant Principle at work.

To put a more positive perspective on it, our communities of faith are spaces where we "work out our salvation with fear and trembling" together (Phil. 2:12). Given the multiplicity of such workings, we should probably be pretty humble about our group being right. And we should quite probably be more generous toward the groups and individuals whose interpretations are different from ours. 

In the end, God will sort us all out.